The present invention relates to a dispensing system and more particularly to a control and display system for fully automated self-service operation of a gasoline station.
With the ever increasing price of gasoline, the popularity of self-service stations which provide the consumer with the opportunity of supplying gasoline to his own vehicle at a savings without a reduction in profits to the station owner has greatly increased. Several self-service control systems have been developed permitting a single and relatively unskilled operator to monitor and control the dispensing of gasoline at a variety of pump locations.
To date, such efforts have produced hard wired complex digital systems which provide a plurality of digital displays of the volume and/or price information for each dispenser once the dispenser has been armed by the operator permitting its operation by the consumer. U.S. Pat. No. 3,878,377 issued Apr. 15, 1975 to P. Brunone is representative of such system. Also, self-service systems have been devised where the consumer can prepay for a predetermined amount of gasoline with the dispenser being automatically shut off once the dollar amount of the sale has been completed or the tank filled, whereupon the consumer receives change for whatever amount of the sale was not realized. U.S. Pat. No. 3,871,503 issued Mar. 18, 1975 to R. Greenwood is representative of such a system. Also, U.S. Pat. No. 3,765,567 issued Oct. 16, 1973 to J. Maiocco is representative of the general state of the art in gasoline dispensing systems.
The state of the art in the self-service gasoline dispensing area thus has been to utilize separate display units for each dispenser, each of which being located at a central area for the operator to monitor the sales and volume of each of the dispensers. Such systems utilize a tremendous number of digital logic circuits which typically include many integrated circuit chips mounted on printed circuit boards but which require costly circuitry for their interconnection. Inasmuch as they are hard wired, they lack flexibility for providing custom applications. Further, such systems have heretofore lacked capability of any significant expansion of functions.